Why would anyone prefer childish simplicity to a
complex drawing that grapples with form, musculature, accumulated fat,
the tension of the skin and the bones and joints beneath?

In his current exhibition, Body Language, [Charles] Saatchi again explores aspects
of figurative art but with neither the aesthetic nor the visceral
challenge of Sensation, and as the artists are not English we can draw
no useful conclusions from it, as we did with the YBAs. It is the
result, I fear, of perhaps too random a trawl in the United States and
casual acquaintance in Japan, Budapest and Yekaterinburg. The only
familiar artist is Chantal Joffe, an American working in London....

The spaces of the Saatchi Gallery are splendid, lofty, vast, the
lighting brilliant, and of this the immediate consequence is that the
paintings it houses are given false authority, and we stand before them
in veneration as though before an altarpiece. But they are not
spiritually thaumaturgical and they deserve no such response. We should
discern at once that Makiko Kudo’s verdant landscapes have only the
shallow charm of murals that the cheap restaurants of my youth employed
to camouflage their shabbiness, that likening Helen Verhoeven’s
supposedly mysterious gatherings to Picasso’s Guernica is as arrogant as
it is absurd, and that Henry Taylor’s kinship with Martin Maloney, of
whom, Californian born, bred and working, he can hardly be aware, is
merely another example of the internationalism of bad painting. Why must
the critic waste his time struggling to discern purpose in such feeble
rubbish?....

The Wallace Collection exhibits 37 academies on loan from the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts in Paris, where there is a cache of more than 600 by 220
artists between 1664 and 1793. They are probably the best but I have
seen many that are as good or better, drawn over a far longer period as
well as by other nationalities — even at the Slade, Royal Academy and
South Kensington (the precursor of the Royal College) Schools they were
part of the discipline well into the 20th century. They are not rare,
nor are they expensive; instead, they are a genre of old master drawing
that even the most modest collector may collect, and as observations of
body language I would rather have one fine academy than all the slipshod
bodies now on view in the Saatchi Gallery. Sorry, Charles.…